Month: October 2015

What is the Indian Health Service (IHS)? The video below gives a nice primer on the history of IHS. The IHS provides health care to American Indians and Alaska Natives at 33 hospitals, 59 health centers and 50 health centers. You can find the current locations of IHS facilities HERE. Whereas the IHS annual budget…

Here’s a graphic from the NIHCM foundation summarizing where federal revenues come in an where they are spent. As you can see about one quarter of the budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and ACA Subsidies and another quarter is spent on Social Security. This is not news if you have been reading the Healthcare Economist diligently…

NCCN recently released a new approach to measure the value of cancer medicines. The approach–known as Evidence Blocks–evaluates medications on 5 dimensions: Efficacy of regimens, Safety of regimens, Quality and quantity of evidence for regimens, Consistency of evidence for regimens, and Affordability of regimens. Each criteria is ranked on a 1 to 5 block scale.…

What is the 340B program? A May 2015 MedPAC report has a nice summary: The 340B Drug Pricing Program allows certain hospitals and other health care providers (“covered entities”) to obtain discounted prices on “covered outpatient drugs” (prescription drugs and biologics other than vaccines) from drug manufacturers. Manufacturers must offer 340B discounts to covered entities…

Halloween is almost upon us. The week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review reveals some of the most frightful news from around the blog-o-sphere. In the spirit of the season, Julie Ferguson of Workers Comp Insider has dusted off her archives to ferret out the blog’s scariest – and most popular – posts. Some are fascinating…

Medicare’s Shared Savings Program (MSSP) contracts with accountable care organizations (ACOs) and provides financial rewards to ACOs that provide high-quality, low-cost care. One question is whether or not the MSSP program does a good job of defining quality. A paper by Valuck and co-authors examines what constitutes high-quality of care for 20 high-cost and highly prevalent…